Bargaining Update #7 (12/9/15)
Dear colleagues,
There is a Board Meeting this Wednesday night, December 9th, which begins at 6:30 p.m., and the CCFF is asking faculty to show up. The CCFF would like to present to the Board a Cerritos College faculty that is united and concerned about salary, health benefits, and the increasing workload of all faculty (SLOs) and chairs without adequate compensation.
It’s a busy time of year, yes, but your support, your presence can make a difference. And later, when you receive that salary bump, when you know your colleagues’ families have full health benefits, and when you see part-time faculty arriving to campus in something better than that mustard-colored 1976 Datsun B-210 with the left-front fender missing (I’m thinking of my days as a part-timer) and not brown-bagging a peanut-butter-and-jelly for dinner, you can take some credit for having made things better.
Invitation
Also, there will be pizza, salads, and soft drinks in LC-62 between 5:20 and 6:00 p.m. If you want some, RSVP to Stephanie Rosenblatt at srosenblatt@cerritos.edu
Update #7
The bargaining teams met last Wednesday, 2 December, and attended to three matters:
- Health Benefits
- Salary
- Assignment Article
Health Benefits
After hearing from members at the public meeting in November, the CCFF presented a counter proposal that accepted the District’s offer to provide retirees with $200/month to subsidize heath care costs, which is an increase from the current $149. The CCFF also accepted the District’s proposal to cover all health care costs for ALL plans for the next three years, 2016, 2017, and 2018. Still under consideration is the District’s obligation to cover benefits in 2019. Should the District and the CCFF fail to come to an agreement prior to 2018, the District wants to cap coverage at a lesser amount. The CCFF is asking that the District cover up to the same amount they have agreed to pay in 2018.
Salary Increase for Full and Part-Time Faculty and Changes to the Salary Schedule
The CCFF presented the following proposals
Raises over the Next Three Years
The CCFF has proposed salary increases for every member of our unit. Given the current state of the economy and budgetary prospects, the CCFF has proposed the largest increases for 2015 and 2016 and a smaller increase for 2017. Any increase for this year will be retroactive to July 1 of 2015. The goal is to win back some of the purchasing power lost during the last seven years. Further, in order to close the gap between part-time and full-time faculty salaries, all proposals include an extra 1% for part-time faculty members.
Adding Three Steps to the Full-Time and Part-Time Salary Schedule
The proposal also adds three steps to every column of the existing salary schedule, which means faculty members would continue to receive step increases for three additional years. For Full-Time faculty, longevity step increases will be 2 years rather than the current 4. Only one other college among our peers has a 4-year wait for a longevity increase.
Deleting Steps from the Part-Time Salary Schedule
As you know, part-time pay at Cerritos College is low. Indeed, new hires are paid less than anyone working in our 9 peer districts. Not only does Cerritos College lose talented part-time faculty members to neighboring districts every year, but such low pay also contributes to the degradation of the cultural regard for educators.
The proposal includes eliminating the first two steps of the salary schedule for part-time faculty so that all new faculty will be hired at step three and that faculty currently working on steps one or two will be immediately bumped to step three. We did this for full-time faculty in 2001, which helped make our District’s salaries more competitive and attractive to new hires. Although small, this is an important step toward closing the gap between part-time and full-time salaries.
Assignment Article
The CCFF also began presenting the Assignment Article which describes the work we do, how that work is scheduled, and how work is compensated.
The topics covered in this article are:
- work week, work year, and assigned hours
- Faculty Service Areas
- assignment & scheduling of classes
- office hours
- overload
- load banking/balancing
- reassigned time
- intercession
- associate faculty status for part-time faculty
- Adult Education
- coaches
- counselors
- librarians
- Success Center instructional specialists
- department chairs – including proposals for compensation
- program directors – including proposals for compensation
- Distance Education
Another short negotiations session is scheduled for Thursday, December 10th. At this meeting the District has promised either to agree or to bring a counter proposal to the CCFF’s Health Benefits proposal and to bring counter proposals on Academic Freedom and Salary. The CCFF is still waiting for District counter proposals on Just Cause.